AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Questions and Answers

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Scenario: Security Requirement

All secrets used by Azure services must be stored in Azure Key Vault.

Services that require credentials must have the credentials tied to the service instance. The credentials must NOT be shared between services.

Box 1: A service principal

A service principal is a type of security principal that identifies an application or service, which is to say, a piece of code rather than a user or group. A service principal's object ID is known as its client ID and acts like its username. The service principal's client secret acts like its password.

Note: Authentication with Key Vault works in conjunction with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), which is responsible for authenticating the identity of any given security principal.

A security principal is an object that represents a user, group, service, or application that's requesting access to Azure resources. Azure assigns a unique object ID to every security principal.

Box 2: A role assignment

You can provide access to Key Vault keys, certificates, and secrets with an Azure role-based access control.

(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/azure/migration/app-service#com-and-com-components)

Azure App Service does not allow the registration of COM components on the platform. If your app makes use of any COM components, these need to be rewritten in managed code and deployed with the site or application. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/azure/migration/app-service

"Azure App Service with Windows Containers If your app cannot be migrated directly to App Service, consider App Service using Windows Containers, which enables usage of the GAC, COM components, MSIs, full access to .NET FX APIs, DirectX, and more."

Activity logs are kept for 90 days. You can query for any range of dates, as long as the starting date isn't more than 90 days in the past.

Through activity logs, you can determine:

what operations were taken on the resources in your subscription

who started the operation

when the operation occurred

the status of the operation

the values of other properties that might help you research the operation

With Cosmos DB's novel multi-region (multi-master) writes replication protocol, every region supports both writes and reads. The multi-region writes capability also enables:

Unlimited elastic write and read scalability.

99.999% read and write availability all around the world.

Guaranteed reads and writes served in less than 10 milliseconds at the 99th percentile.

Quantity: The amount of compute resources being purchased within the capacity reservation. The quantity is a number of vCores in the selected Azure region and Performance tier that are being reserved and will get the billing discount. For example, if you run or plan to run multiple databases with the total compute capacity of Gen5 16 vCores in the East US region, then you would specify the quantity as 16 to maximize the benefit for all the databases.

Instead, you should deploy two Azure virtual machines to two Azure regions, and you create a Traffic Manager profile.

Before you upload a Windows virtual machine (VM) from on-premises to Azure, you must prepare the virtual hard disk (VHD or VHDX).

Scenario: WebApp1 has a web tier that uses Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and a database tier that runs Microsoft SQL Server 2016. The web tier and the database tier are deployed to virtual machines that run on Hyper-V.

Scenario: App1 has the following data requirements:

Each instance will write data to a data store in the same availability zone as the instance.

Data written by any App1 instance must be visible to all App1 instances.

Azure Cosmos DB: Each partition across all the regions is replicated. Each region contains all the data partitions of an Azure Cosmos container and can serve reads as well as serve writes when multi-region writes is enabled.

1. Download the VHD of the Azure Migrate appliance.

2. Create an appliance virtual machine.

3. Configure the virtual machine for the appliance.

4. Register the virtual machine for the appliance.

Step 1: You need to get the VHD of the Azure Migrate appliance.

Step 2: Use this VHD to create a new virtual machine, which will serve as the appliance.

Step 3: Configure the appliance VM with the appropriate settings.

Step 4: Register the appliance with the Azure Migrate project so it can discover the on-premises Hyper-V virtual machines.

Azure Container Instances enables a layered approach to orchestration, providing all of the scheduling and management capabilities required to run a single container, while allowing orchestrator platforms to manage multi-container tasks on top of it.

Because the underlying infrastructure for container instances is managed by Azure, an orchestrator platform does not need to concern itself with finding an appropriate host machine on which to run a single container.

Azure Container Instances can schedule both Windows and Linux containers with the same API.

Orchestration of container instances exclusively

Because they start quickly and bill by the second, an environment based exclusively on Azure Container Instances offers the fastest way to get started and to deal with highly variable workloads.

A data factory can have one or more pipelines. A pipeline is a logical grouping of activities that together perform a task.

The activities in a pipeline define actions to perform on your data.

Data Factory has three groupings of activities: data movement activities, data transformation activities, and control activities.

Azure Functions is now integrated with Azure Data Factory, allowing you to run an Azure function as a step in your data factory pipelines.

Box 1: Yes

Any new deployments to Azure must be redundant in case an Azure region fails.

Traffic Manager uses DNS to direct client requests to the most appropriate service endpoint based on a traffic-routing method and the health of the endpoints. An endpoint is any Internet-facing service hosted inside or outside of Azure. Traffic Manager provides a range of traffic-routing methods and endpoint monitoring options to suit different application needs and automatic failover models. Traffic Manager is resilient to failure, including the failure of an entire Azure region.

Box 2: Yes

Recent changes in Azure brought some significant changes in autoscaling options for Azure Web Apps (i.e. Azure App Service to be precise as scaling happens on App Service plan level and has effect on all Web Apps running in that App Service plan).

Box 3: No

Traffic Manager provides a range of traffic-routing methods and endpoint monitoring options to suit different application needs and automatic failover models. Traffic Manager is resilient to failure, including the failure of an entire Azure region.

Directory synchronization between Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and corp.fabrikam.com must not be affected by a link failure between Azure and the on-premises network. (This requires domain controllers in Azure)

Users on the on-premises network must be able to authenticate to corp.fabrikam.com if an Internet link fails. (This requires domain controllers on-premises)

Service Bus is a transactional message broker and ensures transactional integrity for all internal operations against its message stores. All transfers of messages inside of Service Bus, such as moving messages to a dead-letter queue or automatic forwarding of messages between entities, are transactional.

Scenario: To access the resources in Azure, App1 must use the managed identity of the virtual machines that will host the app.

Managed identities provide an identity for applications to use when connecting to resources that support Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication. Applications may use the managed identity to obtain Azure AD tokens.

Box 1: Standard general-purpose v2

Standard general-purpose v2 supports Blob Storage.

Azure Storage provides data protection for Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2.

Scenario:

Litware identifies the following security and compliance requirements:

Once App1 is migrated to Azure, you must ensure that new data can be written to the app, and the modification of new and existing data is prevented for a period of three years.

On-premises users and services must be able to access the Azure Storage account that will host the data in App1.

Access to the public endpoint of the Azure Storage account that will host the App1 data must be prevented.

All Azure SQL databases in the production environment must have Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) enabled.

App1 must NOT share physical hardware with other workloads.

Box 2: NFSv3

Scenario: Plan: Migrate App1 to Azure virtual machines.

Blob storage now supports the Network File System (NFS) 3.0 protocol. This support provides Linux file system compatibility at object storage scale and prices and enables Linux clients to mount a container in Blob storage from an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) or a computer on-premises.

Box 1: Azure Files

Scenario: App2 has the following file storage requirements:

Save files to an Azure Storage account.

Replicate files to an on-premises location.

Ensure that on-premises clients can read the files over the LAN by using the SMB protocol.

Box 2: Azure File Sync

Use Azure File Sync to centralize your organization's file shares in Azure Files, while keeping the flexibility, performance, and compatibility of an on-premises file server. Azure File Sync transforms Windows Server into a quick cache of your Azure file share. You can use any protocol that's available on Windows Server to access your data locally, including SMB, NFS, and FTPS. You can have as many caches as you need across the world.

Scenario: Once App1 is migrated to Azure, you must ensure that new data can be written to the app, and the modification of new and existing data is prevented for a period of three years.

As an administrator, you can lock a subscription, resource group, or resource to prevent other users in your organization from accidentally deleting or modifying critical resources. The lock overrides any permissions the user might have.

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Box 1: Azure AD Identity Protection

Azure AD Identity Protection helps you manage the roll-out of Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) registration by configuring a Conditional Access policy to require MFA registration no matter what modern authentication app you are signing in to.

Scenario: Users that manage the production environment by using the Azure portal must connect from a hybrid Azure AD-joined device and authenticate by using Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).

Box 2: Sign-in risk policy...

Scenario: The Litware.com tenant has a conditional access policy named capolicy1. Capolicy1 requires that when users manage the Azure subscription for a production environment by using the Azure portal, they must connect from a hybrid Azure AD-joined device.

Identity Protection policies we have two risk policies that we can enable in our directory.

Sign-in risk policy

User risk policy

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/long-term-retention-overview

In Azure SQL Database, you can configure a database with a long-term backup retention policy (LTR) to automatically retain the database backups in separate Azure Blob storage containers for up to 10 years

Box 1: SQL Managed Instance

Scenario: Once migrated to Azure, DB1 and DB2 must meet the following requirements:

Maintain availability if two availability zones in the local Azure region fail.

Fail over automatically.

Minimize I/O latency.

The auto-failover groups feature allows you to manage the replication and failover of a group of databases on a server or all databases in a managed instance to another region. It is a declarative abstraction on top of the existing active geo-replication feature, designed to simplify deployment and management of geo-replicated databases at scale. You can initiate a geo-failover manually or you can delegate it to the Azure service based on a user-defined policy. The latter option allows you to automatically recover multiple related databases in a secondary region after a catastrophic failure or other unplanned event that results in full or partial loss of the SQL Database or SQL Managed Instance availability in the primary region.

Box 2: Business critical

SQL Managed Instance is available in two service tiers:

General purpose: Designed for applications with typical performance and I/O latency requirements.

Business critical: Designed for applications with low I/O latency requirements and minimal impact of underlying maintenance operations on the workload.

Scenario: The Network Contributor built-in RBAC role must be used to grant permissions to the network administrators for all the virtual networks in all the Azure subscriptions.

RBAC roles must be applied at the highest level possible.

Box 1: The Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator estimates the cost savings you can realize by migrating your workloads to Azure.

Note: The TCO Calculator recommends a set of equivalent services in Azure that will support your applications. Our analysis will show each cost area with an estimate of your on-premises spend versus your spend in Azure. There are several cost categories that either decrease or go away completely when you move workloads to the cloud.

Box 2: Azure Hybrid Benefit

Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that helps you to significantly reduce the costs of running your workloads in the cloud. It works by letting you use your on-premises Software Assurance-enabled Windows Server and SQL Server licenses on Azure. And now, this benefit applies to RedHat and SUSE Linux subscriptions, too.

Scenario:

Litware identifies the following security and compliance requirements:

Once App1 is migrated to Azure, you must ensure that new data can be written to the app, and the modification of new and existing data is prevented for a period of three years.

On-premises users and services must be able to access the Azure Storage account that will host the data in App1.

Access to the public endpoint of the Azure Storage account that will host the App1 data must be prevented.

All Azure SQL databases in the production environment must have Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) enabled.

App1 must not share physical hardware with other workloads.

Private Endpoint securely connect to storage accounts from on-premises networks that connect to the VNet using VPN or ExpressRoutes with private-peering.

Private Endpoint also secure your storage account by configuring the storage firewall to block all connections on the public endpoint for the storage service.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/expressroute/expressroute-faqs#microsoft-peering

Scenario: All Azure SQL databases in the production environment must have Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) enabled.

Step 1: Create an Azure policy definition that uses the deployIfNotExists identity.

The first step is to define the roles that deployIfNotExists and modify needs in the policy definition to successfully deploy the content of your included template.

Step 2: Create an Azure policy assignment

When creating an assignment using the portal, Azure Policy both generates the managed identity and grants it the roles defined in roleDefinitionIds.

Step 3: Invoke a remediation task

Resources that are non-compliant to a deployIfNotExists or modify policy can be put into a compliant state through Remediation. Remediation is accomplished by instructing Azure Policy to run the deployIfNotExists effect or the modify operations of the assigned policy on your existing resources and subscriptions, whether that assignment is to a management group, a subscription, a resource group, or an individual resource.

During evaluation, the policy assignment with deployIfNotExists or modify effects determines if there are non-compliant resources or subscriptions. When non-compliant resources or subscriptions are found, the details are provided on the Remediation page.

Box 1: 3

Scenario: App1 must meet the following requirements:

Be hosted in an Azure region that supports availability zones.

Maintain availability if two availability zones in the local Azure region fail.

A host group is a resource that represents a collection of dedicated hosts. You create a host group in a region and an availability zone, and add hosts to it.

Use Availability Zones for fault isolation

Availability zones are unique physical locations within an Azure region. Each zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. A host group is created in a single availability zone. Once created, all hosts will be placed within that zone. To achieve high availability across zones, you need to create multiple host groups (one per zone) and spread your hosts accordingly.

Box 2: 1

Scenario: App1 must meet the following requirements:

Be hosted on Azure virtual machines that support automatic scaling.

An Azure virtual machine scale set can automatically increase or decrease the number of VM instances that run your application. This automated and elastic behavior reduces the management overhead to monitor and optimize the performance of your application.